6 months

On Saturday, Ryan and I celebrated our six month anniversary. It is hard to believe we have really been married six months. I had defensive driving all day, but arrived home to a bunch of tulips and pictures that Ryan had developed of us. We also got our wedding video on Saturday so it was really fun to watch it and remember all the special moments.

We celebrated by going to the Oasis for dinner. It is a restaurant on Lake Travis with absolutely beautiful views. They had a live band and so we spend the evening (along with thousands of others) dancing, eating, and watching the sunset.

Here are some pictures from our night. After we got home we made chocolate covered strawberries and bananas for dessert!

In honor of our 6 month anniversary I thought I would write about the top six things I love about Ryan and being married to him:

1. Learning Together. The amazing thing about marriage is that you have someone to process and learn with all the time. Whether it is learning new things about each other, God, cooking, music, or about ourselves it is a beautiful thing to do with someone.

2. Saturday Morning Pancakes. It has been a tradition for Ryan to cook pancakes every Saturday morning. He has even invented a new type of pancake. He scrambles eggs then he pours the pancake batter around the eggs and makes an egg pancake. It is delicious!

3. Joy. Ryan is one of the most positive people I know. He finds joy in so many things(like good food, a good book(he even loves books that are thousands of pages long and loves reading through all of it!), good relationships, and good wine). He has helped to teach me to enjoy the small things.

4. Date Night. We decided when we got married that we would have a night every week where we just spend time with each other. We use this time to focus on our marriage and our hopes and dreams for our marriage and each other. We do different things on date night, for example; salsa dancing, exploring different coffee shops, watching 24, and checking out different restaurants. Austin has endless options for this kind of thing.

5. Snuggling. I really love to snuggle. Marriage = constant snuggle partner.

6. Unconditional love and forgiveness. We have quickly learned that the closer you are to a person the more that person has the ability to hurt you. We definitely are not perfect and have already done a lot of selfish, hurtful things to one another. The amazing thing is that God has given us so much grace and we are able to extend that to one another and experience more of God through one another's love and forgiveness. It is such an amazing thing to completely, unashamedly know and be known by someone in marriage. I am so thankful God gave us this gift in order to for us to have a very small glimpse of His TRUE, NEVER FAILING unconditional love and forgiveness.

I have been accused(I believe wrongly) of still being in the "honeymoon phase" and wearing "rose-colored glasses." So in an attempt to fight this stereo-type and be honest about marriage I decided to include a list of 6 annoying things about marriage:

1. Getting elbowed in the face. Ryan likes to sleep with his arm up under my pillow, well when he gets tired of his arm being in this position he carefully removes it. More than once, this has resulted in his elbow jamming into my face in the middle of the night.

2. Clutter. Ryan loves books and to study. He is usually reading multiple books at a time. On most days if you come to our apartment you can find anywhere from 5-10 books scattered around...on the table, on the desk, ect. (Okay I have to admit a few of the books are mine, but most of them are his!)

3. The Pregnant Question. Now that we are married anytime we tell someone we have some news we want to share with them, they automatically think we are pregnant. I guess it is just that time in our lives.

4. Alarm clock. Ryan is a morning person and I am most definitely not. He likes to wake up really early and read and study. He likes to set his alarm a good 30 minutes before he wants to wake up, this means that the alarm goes off around 5:30 multiple times every morning. At least it is a soft alarm that sounds like wind chimes.

5. Weird noise. Ryan does this weird thing where he makes a noise in his throat/nose. It is really hard to explain. He does it when his throat or ear itches. It is very strange to me. I think he learned it from someone in his family :)

6. Decisions. I have learned now being two people instead of one means that you check with each other before making plans and decisions. I think this is really a good thing and teaching us what it means to not be so selfish. However, it does mean that it takes a lot longer to make plans and decisions that it did as a single person.

I love being married to Ryan Hartsfield and hope you enjoyed a little glimpse into our first six months!